Mozilla releases Rust 0.1, the language that will eventually usurp Firefox’s C++

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After more than five years in the pipeline, Mozilla Labs and the Rust community have released the first alpha — version 0.1 — of the Rust programming language compiler. The Rust language emphasizes concurrency and memory safety, and — if everything goes to plan — is ultimately being groomed to replace C++ as Mozilla’s compiled language of choice. Browser prototypes programmed in Rust will eventually emerge, and then one day Firefox — or parts of Firefox — might be re-written in Rust.

A bit more about the language itself: Rust is a compiled, statically-typed, object-oriented programming language (and objects are immutable by default). The compiler is supported on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Feature-wise, Rust intentionally avoids any novel ideas, and instead builds upon existing, known features that are present in other languages. Syntax-wise, Rust uses curly braces {} like C, C++, or JavaScript, but as you can see in the code block below, the syntax is actually quite funky.

At this point we have to compare Rust to Go, Google’s new language. The Rust community explicitly says that it was not inspired by Go — development of Rust began before Go — but that other languages made by Rob Pike such as Newsqueak, Alef, and Limbo were influential. Feature-wise, the languages are quite similar, but Rust seems to be more security- and safety-oriented. Where Go has global garbage collection, null pointers, and shared mutable states, Rust GC is optional and per-task, null pointers are not allowed, and objects are immutable by default.

As far as the state of the language is concerned, most of its features work but are incomplete. Standard library APIs are subject to change. Performance isn’t yet up to scratch (eventually it should be as fast as C++). In other words, you can dive in and play with Rust, but future versions of the compiler will break your code.

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